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trump was briefed on this when he took office. he was briefed earlier this year and instead of acting he made it political by claiming it was deep state and a dem hoax. you guys can cover for him all you want but i saw it and heard him.

And he is still doing it.

Trump brings his tear-down-your-opponents politics to the coronavirus fight

Weeks of criticism over his administration’s slow rollout of assistance to states combating the coronavirus pandemic have impressed upon President Trump the need to talk about the massive amounts of materiel now on their way to affected areas. During a news briefing in the White House Rose Garden on Sunday, Trump invited executives from two companies producing and providing supplies to talk about their work.

“One of the issues we’re struggling with is the demand increase,” said Ed Pesicka, CEO of the health-care logistics company Owens & Minor. “You know, used an anecdotal example of one hospital in New York that traditionally uses roughly [10,000] to 20,000 masks a week [and is] now using [200,000] to 300,000 masks a week. So you multiply that times the entire U.S., let alone the same demand outside of the U.S.”

Trump seized on that increase to make a point.

“How do you go from 10 to 20, to 300,000? Ten to 20,000 masks to 300,000?” he said. “Even though this is different, something is going on, and you ought to look into it as reporters. Where are the masks going? Are they going out the back door? How do you go from 10,000 to 300,000? . . . Somebody should probably look into that, because I just don’t see, from a practical standpoint, how that’s possible to go from that to that.”

It’s not terribly complicated. An increase from 10,000 to 300,000 is a thirty-fold increase. Consider the sorts of shifts that might drive that increase: a virus that’s far more contagious than things like the seasonal flu, and a flood of patients pulling in health-care workers from throughout the hospital. The former shift means that protective equipment needs to be worn and changed more often. The latter means that more people need to wear it. That thirty-fold increase is the far end of the scale. Pesicka also talked about an increase from 20,000 to 200,000 — a jump only a third the size.

Later, after criticizing New York state for warehousing ventilators instead of distributing them immediately to hospitals, Trump revisited Pesicka’s comments, claiming that “the biggest man in the business is, like, shocked” at the increase — a sentiment that Pesicka did not express in his public comments.

Trump’s suggestion that the masks were being purloined quickly gained attention, prompting his campaign to go into damage-control mode. It focused on a statement from New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) from March 6.

“There have been thefts of medical equipment and masks from hospitals, believe it or not. Not just people taking a couple or three. I mean actual thefts of those products,” Cuomo said. He added that he has asked the state police to investigate marketplaces that are selling masks and “playing into this, exploiting anxiety.”

One campaign staffer also pointed to an article in which a doctor reported “thefts of respirator masks and other essential protective equipment in lobbies and other high-traffic areas."

All of this distracts — intentionally — from Pesicka’s main point: the need for protective equipment is surging and straining the ability of manufacturers and distributors to provide it. For all of Trump’s touting of how much is being done, which continued during a lengthy interview on “Fox & Friends” on Monday morning, it’s nonetheless obvious that the resources were not on hand to meet the surging needs of hospitals across the country.

The Trump campaign has repeatedly cited Post reporting indicating that the national stockpile of medical supplies was not replenished after a surge in need in 2009, ignoring that three of the subsequent years were ones when Trump was president. Trump’s comments Sunday were probably driven in part by a Post report that an early-February request for $2 billion in funding to replenish the strategic stockpile was slashed to $500 million at the end of the month, a 75 percent cut.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that New York hospitals are losing 10 percent of their masks to theft. There’s no evidence that the scale of whatever losses are still occurring is that dramatic, but let’s just say it is. Does that change that there is a dire shortage of masks and a need for more? Does that reduce the number of masks that are needed? Should the federal government instead provide only the 10,000 or 20,000 that hospitals used to get?

Trump has repeatedly suggested that there is somehow something suspect about New York’s requests in particular. Perhaps he sincerely thinks there is, given the way in which some enrichment schemes in the city have historically worked. But his insistence to Fox News’s Sean Hannity that New York was requesting more ventilators than it needed last week -- as well as his arguments on Fox on Monday that the state did not buy ventilators that were available when they were for sale in 2015 (and when the coronavirus at the center of the pandemic likely did not exist), that the state is not distributing ventilators (because it’s waiting to see where they’re needed) and that New York hospitals are allowing masks to be stolen by the thousands -- all have a main focus: shifting blame away from himself and onto Cuomo and others.

This is a political strategy. It’s one that served him well in the 2016 general election campaign, focusing negative attention on Hillary Clinton and helping suppress enthusiasm for her candidacy. His victory that year can be attributed to people who didn’t like either major-party candidate, a group he won by double digits, including in the three states that gave him his electoral vote margin. Here, again, he is offering America another focus of its frustration.

For his base of support, it’s icing; most don’t need his redirection in order to stay loyal. For everyone else, though, it introduces a conversation about where points of failure exist that are not centered in the White House. His campaign officials respond to questions about Trump’s comments about the 300,000 masks as though they are incensed that the president’s claims should be treated with skepticism or were not obviously true. In reality, they and Trump are thrilled to have the conversation be one in which they can equate Cuomo’s narrow, old comments with Trump’s sweeping, new ones -- and one in which masks being swiped from a hospital lobby in Boston is a reason that New York doesn’t have the masks it needs now.

Both on Sunday and in his interview Monday morning, Trump spoke about how the virus has affected a hospital in Queens, near where he grew up. It’s hard not to live in the area, as Trump did for most of his life, and not be affected by the obvious strains and fear that New Yorkers are experiencing.

For a president focused on winning reelection in seven months, though, it’s also hard to resist trying to figure out which opponent needs to be scapegoated to make yourself look better by comparison.

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trump was briefed on this when he took office. he was briefed earlier this year and instead of acting he made it political by claiming it was deep state and a dem hoax. you guys can cover for him all you want but i saw it and heard him.

Please point out to me where I covered for him in my post that you quoted.

Trump can be blamed for a lot of things. You can definitely say he hasn't managed the crisis well in terms of messaging by not taking it seriously back in January and February but his actions like restricting travel have been what's mattered most.

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FEBRUARY 3, 2020 / 5:33 AM / 2 MONTHS AGO

WHO chief says widespread travel bans not needed to beat China virus

GENEVA (Reuters) - World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Monday there was no need for measures that “unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade” in trying to halt the spread of a coronavirus that has killed 361 people in China.

“We call on all countries to implement decisions that are evidence-based and consistent,” Tedros told the WHO executive board, reiterating his message from last week when he declared an international emergency.

China is facing increasing international isolation due to restrictions on flights to and from the country, and bans on travellers from China.

There have been 17,238 confirmed infections in China including 361 deaths, as well as 151 confirmed cases in 23 countries and 1 death which was reported from the Philippines on Sunday, Tendros added.

“Because of this strategy and it weren’t for China, the number of cases outside China would have been very much higher,” he said.

Referring to the virus’ spread abroad, he said it was “minimal and slow”, while warning that it could worsen.

Tedros, who held talks in Beijing a week ago with Chinese President Xi Jinping and other leaders, coughed and interrupted his speech to take a drink of water, quipping: “Don’t worry, it’s not corona”.

China’s delegate took the floor at the WHO Executive Board and denounced measures by “some countries” that have denied entry to people holding passports issued in Hubei province - at the center of the outbreak - and to deny visas and cancel flights.

“All these measures are seriously against recommendation by the WHO,” said Li Song, who is China’s ambassador for disarmament at the United Nations in Geneva.

China’s regular Executive Board representative was unable to attend after her flight from Beijing was canceled, Chinese diplomats told reporters on Friday.

U.S. ambassador Andrew Bremberg said that the outbreak in two dozen countries required focused attention.

“We express our support, prayers, sympathy, and appreciation to the people of China and especially the health responders on the front lines, who are protecting not only their communities, but the world,” Bremberg said.

“We are learning more about the virus every day and implementing appropriate public health measures, in keeping with WHO’s recommendations, to minimize the spread based on the best evidence available. The United States is committed to working with all partners to address this outbreak,” he added.

So there you have the WHO chief saying; days after Trump announced restricting travel to China, that restricting travel isn't the way to to go to beat the virus.

I like Dr. Fauci but he wasn't quick to sound the alarm on this either:

Quote

CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield called in to the Brian Kilmeade Show to discuss the nation's progress in its fight against the coronavirus pandemic. Among the topics discussed was unearthed audio of White House Coronavirus Task Force member and NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci from January 26th assuring Americans that the coronavirus is nothing to worry about.

"The American people should not be worried or frightened by this. It's a very, very low risk to the United States," Dr. Fauci said on The CATS Roundtable. "It isn't something that the American public needs to worry about or be frightened about."

Director Redfield agreed with Dr. Fauci's assessment, saying that at that time in January the information coming out of China suggested "they were pretty certain that this was not transmitted human to human."

"Obviously that became corrected as they saw in the first three, four weeks in January that human to human spread was not only occurring it's actually, as I said, more infectious and I think that led to the situation that we're in today. I think no one could have predicted how transmissible, how infectious this virus really is," he added.

Director Redfield agreed with Dr. Fauci's assessment, saying that at that time in January the information coming out of China suggested "they were pretty certain that this was not transmitted human to human."

"Obviously that became corrected as they saw in the first three, four weeks in January that human to human spread was not only occurring it's actually, as I said, more infectious and I think that led to the situation that we're in today. I think no one could have predicted how transmissible, how infectious this virus really is," he added.

Dr. Fouci's mistake was making such an optimistic statement before sufficient facts were known.

The only reason Trump banned flights from China at such at early date is undoubtedly because it appealed to his inherent xenophobia - he saw an opportunity to close our border to China and jumped on it.

As his subsequent actions and statements clearly indicate, he is clueless about the nature of this pandemic.

Please tell me which one of our illustrious leaders would have done anything different in similar situations. It is so easy to point fingers once we know the effects of something, but another to be in the moment when making decision

this looks to me like you giving him a pass. most leaders would not have blown it off claiming a dem hoax. period. he ignored a sixty something page document on exactly what to do during a pandemic. he has also been making people he does not like beg for help like the gov of meatchicken and he is still saying states best be appreciative of him if they want help. and he was also playing golf while this crap was cranking up. ANY of them would have done stuff different. trump is the national enquirer president. look you believe what you want but in my mind you are very very wrong.

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trump was very slow in reacting to the virus. he kept claiming deep state and a dem hoax. that is fact. you boys can spin it anyway you want. he was warned about pandemics when he first took office and he was told again in january. now he has gone from dem hoax to blaming obama. he is a frigging idiot. if i claimed he held off doing anything so orleans will lose some folks of color you guys would be all over me. that is fact. but when bone spurs claims all this crap you guys give him a pass and you guys are just fine with it.

Perhaps the mayor of New Orleans was too concerned about the impact of canceling Mardi Gras financially and is now looking for a scapegoat. You have seen this spreading throughout the world for a year and you have a festival that is globally known.

Glad Austin doesn't have anything like that... oh wait they do and it was cancelled and no cases had even been identified in Austin at the time.

Maybe they should be embarrassed cause HEB had a better team in place for disaster preparedness:

Abbott has been leaving things up to local officials in Texas on what to do in regards to the virus. Has nothing to do with Trump. If the nonuniform approach has a large negative impact on areas of Texas its going to be on the officials in Texas... not Trump.

So things like a restaurant here in Austin that I placed an online order that is still taking walk ins (and even making them priority over the call ins) and allowing a build up of consumers, or people still going out to Barton Springs swimming areas in mass, are what is going to interfere and not Trump.

Any local officials that are passing the buck are full of s***, it is their responsibility to look out for their communities in a time like this.

Cuomo screwed up, De Blasio screwed up and Trump screwed up by failing to set the tone nationally and activating national preparedness.

Is that bipartisan or nonpartisan enough for you? Repeat after me, “each of them failed, including the President.” Can you do it?

You forgot that bat sh*^ crazy Pelosi inviting people on Feb 24th “You should come to Chinatown. Precautions have been taken by our city. We know there is concern about tourism throughout the world but we think it’s very safe to be in Chinatown and hopefully, others will come.”

But failures went back far beyond that. A great eye opening read: Pandemic of Neglect: How U.S. health care failed to heed repeated warnings of supply shortages

More than a dozen government reports dating to the 1990s warned of the sort of medical supply shortages now being experienced in the coronavirus pandemic.

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You forgot that bat sh*^ crazy Pelosi inviting people on Feb 24th “You should come to Chinatown. Precautions have been taken by our city. We know there is concern about tourism throughout the world but we think it’s very safe to be in Chinatown and hopefully, others will come.”

But failures went back far beyond that. A great eye opening read: Pandemic of Neglect: How U.S. health care failed to heed repeated warnings of supply shortages

More than a dozen government reports dating to the 1990s warned of the sort of medical supply shortages now being experienced in the coronavirus pandemic.

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Director Redfield agreed with Dr. Fauci's assessment, saying that at that time in January the information coming out of China suggested "they were pretty certain that this was not transmitted human to human."

"Obviously that became corrected as they saw in the first three, four weeks in January that human to human spread was not only occurring it's actually, as I said, more infectious and I think that led to the situation that we're in today. I think no one could have predicted how transmissible, how infectious this virus really is," he added.

Dr. Fouci's mistake was making such an optimistic statement before sufficient facts were known.

The only reason Trump banned flights from China at such at early date is undoubtedly because it appealed to his inherent xenophobia - he saw an opportunity to close our border to China and jumped on it.

As his subsequent actions and statements clearly indicate, he is clueless about the nature of this pandemic.

Like they say, even a blind squirrel finds the occasional acorn.

Actually, 45 countries banned travel from China before Trump. At that’s what he supporters point to as his early action.

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this looks to me like you giving him a pass. most leaders would not have blown it off claiming a dem hoax. period. he ignored a sixty something page document on exactly what to do during a pandemic. he has also been making people he does not like beg for help like the gov of meatchicken and he is still saying states best be appreciative of him if they want help. and he was also playing golf while this crap was cranking up. ANY of them would have done stuff different. trump is the national enquirer president. look you believe what you want but in my mind you are very very wrong.

Well, there's your problem right there.

No way Trump could work his way through a 60 page document. (Or, for that matter, even the executive summary (which was probably a half page).

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Trump was racist and xenophobic in January, but Pelosi all good in February. The lengths you guys will go.

The *woke* crowd is amazing to watch. If you criticize Israel, the government, it is not antisemitic as you are criticizing the way Israel is run. However, if you criticize ANY other government as to how it is run you are racist and xenophobic. You can’t have it both ways unless, of course, you are *woke* (void of logic).

Couldn't agree more. What I've witnessed is not "woke" but woefully uneducated. Now they'll argue the fact until the cows come home and the liberal media will run their polling shade, but out here in the real world the evidence supports none of that bs. Trust me, I work with thousands of liberals. No different than the ones that spew utter lies here. IIWII.

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OooOOoo I wonder who the facepalm is from. The suspense is killing me.

Cmon Ichy, apologies if it wasn't you but I highly doubt it, support your BS. Adler is a democrat and took the proper steps with SXSW. Lightfoot is an African American woman that is LGBTQ and a democrat and she took the right steps in shutting down Chicago's ST Paddy's parade. They didn't wait on Trump, they did what they thought was the responsible decision for their community despite the potential economic repercussions.

OooOOoo I wonder who the facepalm is from. The suspense is killing me.

Cmon Ichy, apologies if it wasn't you but I highly doubt it, support your BS. Adler is a democrat and took the proper steps with SXSW. Lightfoot is an African American woman that is LGBTQ and a democrat and she took the right steps in shutting down Chicago's ST Paddy's parade. They didn't wait on Trump, they did what they thought was the responsible decision for their community despite the potential economic repercussions.

This is for you ICHY

I think we should squirt a tube of super glue into ichy's palm so he can just have a permanent face palm.

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For each person in power It's a critical balancing act between stemming public panic and establishing enough of the right protocols to slow the spread. I don't think any expected the magnitude of the virus and it would've been almost impossible to stop any public panic if they had immediately implemented the appropriate measures early on. This is a brand new situation. We've never faced anything like it while this populated, this interconnected, or this capable of travel. From the science to the politics to the finances, there is an obvious learning curve by all involved. I think it's extremely nearsighted to try and pinpoint blame. Unfortunately it's human nature to try and blame anyone else. Rather than spending time trying to blame anyone we should be trying to climb the curve faster. IMO, blame is an exercise in futility and does nothing good except build animosity and appease one's own need to feel better about the situation. JMO.

Of course we need to focus on next steps. But the notion that nothing could have been done is patently false and assumes quality of leadership doesn’t matter. A few facts:

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For each person in power It's a critical balancing act between stemming public panic and establishing enough of the right protocols to slow the spread. You have a very low opinion of the American public if you think we cannot be presented with enough factual information to establish the right protocols when it would have mattered the most.

I don't think any expected the magnitude of the virus and it would've been almost impossible to stop any public panic if they had immediately implemented the appropriate measures early on. That's simply not true. There are many examples of people warning about this possibility - even eventuality, including the Obama administration, who prepared a seminar for the incoming Trump administration on the subject:

This is a brand new situation. We've never faced anything like it while this populated, this interconnected, or this capable of travel. From the science to the politics to the finances, there is an obvious learning curve by all involved. I think it's extremely nearsighted to try and pinpoint blame. Unfortunately it's human nature to try and blame anyone else. Rather than spending time trying to blame anyone we should be trying to climb the curve faster. IMO, blame is an exercise in futility and does nothing good except build animosity and appease one's own need to feel better about the situation. JMO. With all due respect, that's just BS. When you have a tragedy or massive failure, analysis of what caused it is ALWAYS a good thing. It's crucial to avoid repeating it.

As for "blaming" - presumably you mean the Trump administration - that's just a natural outcome of that failure analysis. And there's nothing "futile" about identifying and assigning responsibility for failure. It seems futile only to the extent those responsible refuse to accept accountability for their roles. As a democracy we have to expect better. The alternative is to accept an authoritarian government who will never accept responsibility for any negative outcome.

Here's a excellent example of McConnell trying to assign blame and dodge responsibility on behalf of the administration:

Impeachment didn’t distract from coronavirus preparations. Trump did.

There should have been shame enough in orchestrating the acquittal of an impeached president who, in order to extort help for his reelection campaign, unlawfully withheld security aid to an ally. Shame enough in turning the Senate impeachment trial into a sham by refusing to hear a single live witness.

But it turns out Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was just getting started.

On Tuesday, he added to the disgrace by claiming that impeachment distracted officials from dealing with the coronavirus. Speaking to radio host (and Post columnist) Hugh Hewitt, McConnell said the virus “came up while we were, you know, tied down in the impeachment trial. And I think it diverted the attention of the government, because everything, every day, was all about impeachment.”

Look at the calendar. The impeachment trial ended on Feb. 5. In reality, it was over before it even started, thanks in large part to McConnell. The only drama was about whether there’d be any witnesses — and that ended on Jan. 31, when the Senate voted not to hear testimony. That left plenty of time to deal with the virus.

And while some lawyers in the executive branch and Congress were working on impeachment around the clock, impeachment didn’t consume the government. Trump managed to get to Mar-a-Lago at least four times in January and February, working in a few rounds of golf along the way. He held fivecampaignralliesaroundthe country during the impeachment trial.

Trump even had the bandwidth during the trial to comment on the coronavirus: On Jan. 22, he told CNBC “we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China.” On Jan. 24, he tweeted, “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!” On Jan. 30, at a speech in Michigan, he said again, “We think we have it very well under control.” On Feb. 2, referring to his administration’s Jan. 31 order partially banning travel from China, Trump told Sean Hannity, “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.”

Most importantly, impeachment didn’t keep U.S. intelligence agencies from warning the president and Congress in January and February about the danger of the virus. In particular, as Josh Rogin wrote, impeachment notwithstanding, “throughout January and much of February, senior Trump administration officials heatedly debated the scope and scale of the coronavirus pandemic.”

McConnell’s own colleagues got the message, too. Throughout the early weeks of the crisis, senior administration officials repeatedly briefed senators about the coronavirus. What senators were told was “chilling,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), but the administration wasn’t asking for more funds. “Bottom line: they aren’t taking this seriously enough,” because the administration made “no request for ANY emergency funding, which is a big mistake,” Murphy tweeted — on Feb. 5. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) found enough time in mid-February, apparently prompted by concerns about the emerging pandemic, to sell 33 stocks worth up to $1.7 million, triggering an insider-trading investigation by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission. (Burr denies wrongdoing.)

The problem wasn’t impeachment — it was the president. There was never any chance that the government was going to take sufficient action on the virus when the president himself wasn’t taking the virus seriously. It was Trump, after all, who claimed — at the very end of February, weeks after the impeachment trial had ended — that criticisms such as Murphy’s were a “hoax” and that “within a couple days,” the number of coronavirus cases “is going to be down to close to zero.”

And the problem with the president stemmed from the very same impulses that got him impeached. Just as his focus on himself, and his reelection, led him to extort Ukraine and lie about it, so, too, it led him to deceive the public about the coronavirus as well. Eager to keep the number of coronavirus cases from going up, he didn’t want to let a cruise ship full of Americans dock. He didn’t want virus warnings to spook the stock markets, lest he not be able to brag about the markets during the campaign. Even as late as March 8, a month after the impeachment trial, he told Republican donors at Mar-a-Lago that his political opponents were “trying to scare everybody, from meetings, cancel the meetings, close the schools — you know, destroy the country. And that’s ok, as long as we can win the election.”

For Trump, it’s always about Trump and only Trump. If anything, it was McConnell and his fellow Senate Republicans’ refusal to remove him, not the impeachment itself, that helped bring us to where we are today.

Of course things could have been better and reaction time could have improved. I’m not sure why the media and a few posters are fixated on comparing Trump to perfection? There was not enough reliable data early on to act as swiftly as some would like. This is not a political disaster, it is a human disaster.

During the press conference yesterday Jim Acosta, asked what a lot on the left would like answered, and Dr Fauci gave a good answer:

CNN’S ACOSTA: This may be an uncomfortable question, what would the models have looked like that Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci showed us if we had started the social distancing guidelines sooner in February or January when China and South Korea were doing those sorts of things? … If we had started these practices sooner, could these models be different right now?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Yeah, I’m going to let them answer the question, but remember this. And again, I say it and everybody says it. You know who says it better than anybody is Dr. Fauci. I had a decision to make. Maybe it was my biggest decision. China was heavily infected, and thousands and thousands of people were coming from China to the United States. And against the wishes, not even wishes, but they disagreed with the decision. I made a decision to stop China from coming in. Took a lot of heat, even from China. They weren’t exactly happy. I just made a trade deal, a big one, $250 billion trade deal. And I’m shortly thereafter saying, “You can’t come into our country.”

That was a big decision. That was earlier than the date you’re talking about. So that was a big decision. That was probably, and by the way, not because I did it, that was probably the biggest decision we made so far. But if you look at the one graph, the problem New York has is New York started late, but the other ones didn’t start so late. Now New York is also more complicated, because for obvious reasons, but it got a late start. But do you maybe want to answer those questions?

DR. BIRX: I don’t know if you can go back to slide two, because I wanted to explain two things that I think is really important, because we had a lot of questions about mortality and what it meant. Okay. So you see this confidence interval? So here’s the line. This is the confidence interval. This is where we have the ability to push it down. So you have a large confidence interval around the line. And so we’re trying to move that gray down tighter and below the dotted line. So I think that’s really important.

And then if you can go to the next slide. So we really can’t answer your question until we can get antibody testing out there. Because what we can’t tell you, and we can always do this, there’s always samples in hospitals and other things. It’s the way we really define the HIV epidemic in the United States. We were able to go back to blood samples when we had the test and really find out where it was and what was going on. We really need to look in here. And really see was there virus significantly circulating in early March and late February? And what did it look like? And where was it? And was it all in the metro areas? And I think that’s what Dr. Fauci and I are very, very focused on is getting serology testing out there to really figure out when it came, and really have those samples to be able to do that.

CNN’S ACOSTA: You understand the painful part of my question, and please, I don’t mean to put you on the spot-up there may be Americans at home saying, “If we had started this sooner, we might not have 100000 to 200000 Americans dying.”

DR. BIRX: No, we understand, but we can’t answer it until we see that. Well, that makes an assumption that it was here, a lot back here, that we didn’t see. And until we have the antibody tests, I can’t really answer that.

DR. FAUCI: Just to underscore what Dr. Birx was saying, if there was no virus in the background, there was nothing to mitigate. If there was virus there that we didn’t know about, then the answer to your question is probably yes. Now the only trouble with that is that whenever you come out and say something like that, it always becomes almost a sound bite that gets taken out of context, but I think that’s very important, what Dr. Birxs has said, is that if there was covert infections here that we didn’t know about, and we didn’t mitigate them, that they would’ve made a difference. If there was virtually nothing there, then there’s nothing to mitigate. And I don’t know the answer to your question.

CNN’S ACOSTA: But they were early. They started early. We were watching South Korea, excuse me, and China and Italy, and we weren’t taking action when those countries were spiking.

DR. FAUCI: In a perfect world, it would have been nice to know what was going on there. We didn’t, but I believe Jim, that we, we acted very, very early in that.

So you either believe the CDC staff or not, but they are talking the same story. It’s not Trump saying this it’s the CDC staff.

BTW, has anybody seen Homer post while Jim Acosta has been on TV? Hmmm

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Of course things could have been better and reaction time could have improved. I’m not sure why the media and a few posters are fixated on comparing Trump to perfection? There was not enough reliable data early on to act as swiftly as some would like. This is not a political disaster, it is a human disaster.

During the press conference yesterday Jim Acosta, asked what a lot on the left would like answered, and Dr Fauci gave a good answer:

CNN’S ACOSTA: This may be an uncomfortable question, what would the models have looked like that Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci showed us if we had started the social distancing guidelines sooner in February or January when China and South Korea were doing those sorts of things? … If we had started these practices sooner, could these models be different right now?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Yeah, I’m going to let them answer the question, but remember this. And again, I say it and everybody says it. You know who says it better than anybody is Dr. Fauci. I had a decision to make. Maybe it was my biggest decision. China was heavily infected, and thousands and thousands of people were coming from China to the United States. And against the wishes, not even wishes, but they disagreed with the decision. I made a decision to stop China from coming in. Took a lot of heat, even from China. They weren’t exactly happy. I just made a trade deal, a big one, $250 billion trade deal. And I’m shortly thereafter saying, “You can’t come into our country.”

That was a big decision. That was earlier than the date you’re talking about. So that was a big decision. That was probably, and by the way, not because I did it, that was probably the biggest decision we made so far. But if you look at the one graph, the problem New York has is New York started late, but the other ones didn’t start so late. Now New York is also more complicated, because for obvious reasons, but it got a late start. But do you maybe want to answer those questions?

DR. BIRX: I don’t know if you can go back to slide two, because I wanted to explain two things that I think is really important, because we had a lot of questions about mortality and what it meant. Okay. So you see this confidence interval? So here’s the line. This is the confidence interval. This is where we have the ability to push it down. So you have a large confidence interval around the line. And so we’re trying to move that gray down tighter and below the dotted line. So I think that’s really important.

And then if you can go to the next slide. So we really can’t answer your question until we can get antibody testing out there. Because what we can’t tell you, and we can always do this, there’s always samples in hospitals and other things. It’s the way we really define the HIV epidemic in the United States. We were able to go back to blood samples when we had the test and really find out where it was and what was going on. We really need to look in here. And really see was there virus significantly circulating in early March and late February? And what did it look like? And where was it? And was it all in the metro areas? And I think that’s what Dr. Fauci and I are very, very focused on is getting serology testing out there to really figure out when it came, and really have those samples to be able to do that.

CNN’S ACOSTA: You understand the painful part of my question, and please, I don’t mean to put you on the spot-up there may be Americans at home saying, “If we had started this sooner, we might not have 100000 to 200000 Americans dying.”

DR. BIRX: No, we understand, but we can’t answer it until we see that. Well, that makes an assumption that it was here, a lot back here, that we didn’t see. And until we have the antibody tests, I can’t really answer that.

DR. FAUCI: Just to underscore what Dr. Birx was saying, if there was no virus in the background, there was nothing to mitigate. If there was virus there that we didn’t know about, then the answer to your question is probably yes. Now the only trouble with that is that whenever you come out and say something like that, it always becomes almost a sound bite that gets taken out of context, but I think that’s very important, what Dr. Birxs has said, is that if there was covert infections here that we didn’t know about, and we didn’t mitigate them, that they would’ve made a difference. If there was virtually nothing there, then there’s nothing to mitigate. And I don’t know the answer to your question.

CNN’S ACOSTA: But they were early. They started early. We were watching South Korea, excuse me, and China and Italy, and we weren’t taking action when those countries were spiking.

DR. FAUCI: In a perfect world, it would have been nice to know what was going on there. We didn’t, but I believe Jim, that we, we acted very, very early in that.

So you either believe the CDC staff or not, but they are talking the same story. It’s not Trump saying this it’s the CDC staff.

BTW, has anybody seen Homer post while Jim Acosta has been on TV? Hmmm

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Of course things could have been better and reaction time could have improved. I’m not sure why the media and a few posters are fixated on comparing Trump to perfection? There was not enough reliable data early on to act as swiftly as some would like. This is not a political disaster, it is a human disaster.

During the press conference yesterday Jim Acosta, asked what a lot on the left would like answered, and Dr Fauci gave a good answer:

Dr. Fauci - like many other professionals - has become an expert in handling the narcissist president. His job is to correct Trump without causing him to lose face.

If people are not "nice" to Trump he will fail to do what is needed for them. He admitted it himself.